The Moghamra Podcast · Ep 1 · 20 Jun 2023
From Big Banks to Startups
من البنوك الكبرى إلى الشركات الناشئة
Hatem Sabry — Chief Financial Officer, Money Fellows · Cairo, Egypt
Listen here
Key takeaways
Digitise trusted offline behaviour
The gam'eya / ROSCA already worked socially for generations — Money Fellows' insight was to move that trusted model online rather than invent a new financial habit from scratch.
Corporate finance skills transfer — selectively
Discipline around risk, capital and reporting carries over from banking; the speed, ambiguity and scrappiness of a startup do not, and learning the difference is the real transition.
Sustainability over short-term growth
Hatem frames the modern CFO's job as asking whether the business model is genuinely sustainable for customers, vendors and employees — not just maximising near-term profit.
Interest-free credit via your own network
By structuring savings circles digitally, Money Fellows offers access to credit and higher effective savings returns without traditional interest — financial inclusion built on social trust.
About this episode
Moghamra's debut episode features Hatem Sabry, Chief Financial Officer of Money Fellows. Hatem brings roughly 17 years of financial-services experience — a Director at Deutsche Bank, VP of Finance at Swvl, and CFO at the logistics startup Trella — making him an ideal first guest to unpack the leap from the certainty of big banks to the chaos of startups.
Money Fellows is one of Egypt's most interesting fintechs because it digitises something deeply familiar: the ROSCA, known locally as the gam'eya — a rotating savings and credit circle where a group pools money and each member takes the pot in turn. Money Fellows takes that centuries-old, social, offline behaviour and rebuilds it as a trusted app, giving consumers interest-free credit and better savings powered by their own social network.
The conversation centres on the career pivot itself: what transfers from structured corporate finance into a fast-moving startup, what doesn't, and how a CFO thinks about risk, sustainability and unit economics in a business built on trust between strangers. It's a fitting first chapter for a show about the people building the region's companies.
Never miss an episode.
New conversations with Arab founders and pioneers, dropping regularly. Follow Moghamra for the full, always-current catalog wherever you listen.